sIFR 3: A Request for Requests

October 27th, 2005

The excellent new sIFR-licious UW Admissions Site, designed and developed by Mercury Cloud.Now that Flash 7 penetration is well into the 90% range, it’s time to start thinking about version 3 of sIFR. One of the big selling points of sIFR 2 was that it was backwards-compatible with Flash 6, but given the most current Flash adoption numbers, that doesn’t seem necessary anymore.

SO… what The Dutch Wolf and I would like to do is provide a new version of sIFR which offers baseline compatibility with Flash 7 and progressive-enhancement for Flash 8.

We’ve already come up with a few things we’d like to add but are requesting feature requests from designers and developers in order to make sure this new version is as complete as possible. Here’s initial punchlist:

Ability to display crisper text (especially at small sizes) for people with Flash 8. The Flash 8 Player uses a new anti-aliasing algorithm that now renders Flash text as beautifully as Photoshop does.

More complete text formatting options using Flash’s CSS support. This includes the ability to color individual spans within a single sIFR file.

A major requirement of this release is that it should only take you a minute or two to upgrade any existing sIFR installations, so rest assured that when the new version comes out, it’ll be a snap to install.

Since we’re already talking about sIFR, I wanted to quickly call out some excellent uses of it I’ve seen over the past few months:

Will Prater and friends over at Mercury Cloud have redesigned the admissions site for my alma-mater, The University of Washington, and it is spectacular. Some of the best use of sIFR I’ve ever seen and just a fabulous site to boot.

Thanks to Eric Webster and Digitas, the Pontiac.com site uses sIFR for their mastheads. Pontiac.com is a good example of a Flash-heavy site making smart use of the technology.

I can’t remember who sent me this site (please let me know so I can give you credit) but Propel Fitness Water now makes nice use of sIFR and they even somehow managed to give their sIFR text nice wide kerning. I’d like to know if that required manual editing of font files. Looks very nice.

132 Responses:

GillBates says:

I might be talking out of my rear end here… but how about the ability to use a background image (tiled) for the fonts instead of a color?
Thinking in photoshop terms, it’s something similar to making the characters a reveal/hide mask for the background?
I would completely understand if this gets too complicated and oversteps the bounds of sIFR; but I am requesting it because I was recently forced to make use of images instead of beautiful sIFR based fonts in a site because the navigation links used a very specific gradient (with more than 2 tones of the same color).

I’m not sure if this is available to SIFR or not, I haven’t really read up too much about it but I would guess that many people would like their headlines “Horizontally” aligned…… How about “Vertically?”.

Another site we at Mercury Cloud just released that uses sIFR is Howard University’s Rankin Memorial Chapel. In addition to sIFR, we used some pretty tight flash satay to display nice flash headers and nav, but if flash is off for some reason, the CSS version looks just as good below.

I tried to use sIFR to replace a header graphic a while back. I wasn’t able to do it, nor could I find any documentation at the time to help achieve this goal. It’s possible there has been a solution discovered since, but if not, I would like to suggest that be added.
It’s ironic, I suppose, since sIFR is supposed to give that graphic look in a dynamic package.

I have implemented sIFR on a number of occasions and here is what I would like to see:

1. display of transparent background in sIFR that does not show up as a weird green colour in some micro versions of Netscape 7.0 and some Opera browsers.

2. the ability to utilize the print CSS media type and sIFR AND have a transparent background.

3. better text selection abilities.

4. dynamic widths.

5. any chance of making it render faster? The redraw of the page causes a shift unless you use CSS to match the same height of the flash movie. This resulted in VERY LARGE text presentation if flash player is not present as I recall padding and margins of the CSS did not help. (Please contact me if you need a visual explanation.)

6. once the page has rendered and the visitor changed the text-size, ensure that the text inside the flash movie changes accordingly.

What I noticed with sIFR is that it’s really hard to get the sizes right sometimes in both IE and FF. Any improvements there might help. Although most of those problems come from the tweaking process so maybe it was just the documentation that needed improvements. I know standards are important to follow as far as scalable fonts go but I wouldn’t mind the option to hard code the font sizes.

Gill might be onto something but I can see more problems then it would be worth to allow images to be imported in and masked by the text, especially when the like might end up wrapping. I know that flash had some issues with masks being created and modified dynamically early on and not sure that they fixed it so dynamic text can be used as a mask.

At any rate, it might make sense to add in the ability to import a background image. I can’t think of any time that I would personally use this feature but it would be an alternative to using transparent mode in some cases and is easy enough to pull in images to the swf so it might make a good feature. I have had to lay flash over an existing graphic before and for whatever reason used the image itself as the background of the flash then positioned the movie clip over the image.

Probably best to not get to carried away. Before long you’ll find yourself with an overloaded library of action scipt animations and other things to bloat sIFR. Better to just keep it simple and effective.

Well, I cam here with four or fives great ideas, and I found they’re all already on the list. If you accomplish what you’ve put on the list so far, I will consider forgiving you for the pathetic trade you offered me in the Fantasy League yesterday. :)

I know that you can adjust the letter spacing in the flash file, but in an effort to minimize the number of fonts I avoided this. It would be nice if we could adjust kerning from the .js file.

B. Bold, Italic
Although most font faces come with special fonts for bold and italic, it would be nice to specify such attributes from the .js file.

2) More options for padding
For better or worse (still debating) I’ve created pages that scale, everything uses ems. This made sIFR a challenge because padding has to be specified using pixels. As a result I always had to wrap a text object that I wanted to use sIFR on within a div tag, and then apply padding to the div. Is there a way that we could pass along the unit of measurement (e.g. nPaddingUnit=em)?

3) Resize of window resize
You already mentioned it, but resizing the flash when the window resizes would be awesome. It will make sIFR that much more seamless.

I don’t know if it’s now working, or if a workaround was posted, but I’m still getting a CSS-dropdown menu (Suckerfish-esque) appearing behind the sFIR text, no matter the transparency or the z-index. This is difficult, as the navigation is just above the headline. Any help or fixing of this issue would be appreciated.

Andrew: I’m still getting a CSS-dropdown menu (Suckerfish-esque) appearing behind the sFIR text, no matter the transparency or the z-index

I’m pretty sure the main problem with this comes from ActiveX object support from the web browsers themselves. Although I agree that would be great if controls added to a page could behave more like other objects such as regular divs. There is however ways around this problem. For transparency method to work it needs to be positioned absolute in a div and z-index needs to be set. Also, maybe the iframe hack will work?

2) Alas, sIFR gets its information in pixels. We could also get padding in pixels, but this is not supported by a lot of browsers (Safari 1.2 and below come to mind, as well as some older Opera versions I believe).

I will say this, however. sIFR works because it saw a need. It fixes a problem, enhancing it seamlessly. I dare say that nobody would use sIFR if it were not for the aliasing issue.

Let’s identify more problems and fix them. Let’s discover new enhancements, not just say, “Flash 8 can do this new stuff, so let’s do it.” That being said, better anti-aliasing is huge.

A well pruned list of core functionalities should be adhered to, with a few enhancements as it directly relates to the core. I doubt that we will see a bloated sIFR or anything, I just hope we are selective.

What’s missing from the web now? There are plenty of more “advanced” typography features that sIFR can continue to address. I would love it if sIFR could handle hyphenation, widows & orphans, punctuation spacing, etc.

Aliasing will slowly fade in the next couple of years… I would like to turn to sIFR for the advanced typography features that will not make it to the web for five or ten years. At least that’s how I see its evolution.

It would be nice if sIFR’ed fonts could be allowed to scale along with other non-flash text in a document.

Kerning / Leading (for multiline sIFR) control would be nice (many other above have asked for this as well)

Perhaps some official support for using more than one color of text within a single movie.

This one is a toughie – I’m not sure if its possible (perhaps its even possible with sIFR2, I dunno):
The ability to group more than one CSS selector and have the text from both those tags appear in the same flash movie (obviously they would have to be adjacent)

So, for example, if I had a page like:

<h1>This is a title</h1>
<p>This is the subtitle or witticism to go under the title</p>

It would be cool if I could replace the whole lot of that text with only one flash movie, which would display the header and subheader.

The ability to have complex backgrounds (again, this might be already available, but I’m not certain). For example, if I wanted a certain look behind my pullquotes, it would be cool if I could make a .swf as a background.

Per-word text formatting: This goes somewhat with multi-colored text, but it would be interesting if i could tell sIFR I want the first word formatted with X font and be red, the second word formatted with Y font and be black, etc.

Regular expression handling: So for example, if I wanted the quotation marks in my pullquotes to be huge and my font to be another size, I could write something that could do that.

Finally, I don’t know how you’d pull it off, since this is scaled flash text, but it would be nice to be able to set sIFR to a font size and have it stay there, without having to worry about the pixel height of the box it’s in. (I might just not be using sIFR2 properly, I don’t know)

A lot of my suggestions might not be appropriate for sIFR – they’re just brainstorms. There are some things I don’t want sIFR to do however:

I don’t want to be able to lay out a complicated, fixed dimension header with multiple lines of text and images in sIFR. Thats better done as a custom flash movie with parameters passed to it through a simple DOM script anyway. In my mind, sIFR is for styling text when traditional background image replacement techniques are impractical, such as in blog/news posts, episodic content, etc.

I dont want it to be able to handle things like columns – that would only encourage people to use sIFR for body copy.

You need to be cautious not to include every feature under the sun in sIFR. It’s great at what it does now – don’t make it bloated and attractive for abuse (like replacing body copy).

The Flash 8 Player uses a new anti-aliasing algorithm that now renders Flash text as beautifully as Photoshop does.

I wouldn’t say as beautifully as Photoshop. The anti-aliasing is several degrees better than before (I am able to set text to smaller sizes without fear of blurrying them up, or turning on the Alias option), but the kerning is still a bit of a problem.

Still, it looks real nice, and it’s a no-brainer to include it in the new sIFR.

2. I run into a very bizzare issue when I use a transparent background on the flash movie when the page is printed. I am also using a print.css included file with media=”print” to handle the printing. When I do this, the printed document looks like it prints a green background the entire size of the flash movie. If I change the background to not be transparent I do not run into this issue.

3. Ya, a Flash developer at my work seems to think he can remedy this. If he does, I will let you know.

4. Great!

5. This will make all my designers REALLY happy.

6. I think only web developers change the font size when they test their work anyway! Just thought I would ask.

7. Cool. The little tabs beside each sIFR instance are annoying and even more annoying is the complete removal of them. All of which are almost as annoying as the spoiled brats who whine about sIFR yet have little to no knowledge about the importance of branding of Fortune 500 companies.

2. I’m afraid this is beyond our control. We are checking for transparency support so we can use a fallback color if it isn’t there, but it’d seem that this support is entirely different for print. Use the fallback content for the printer (as the provided CSS does).

3. That’d be great. Thanks.

4. Well, I’m no longer 100% sure if this will be possible, but we’ll sure give it a try!

A) Making the tuning process easier/more consistent (No, I don’t know HOW to do this, but I do know that somehow it needs to be done. This is my biggest issue with sIFR.)

B) the DHTML menu drop down issue… even using the transparent or opaque wmode doesn’t seem to work — this is a pretty big issue.

C) It would be nice if the resizing and FlashBlock issues could be worked out.

D) I would LOVE to have the Flash 8 filters available… they rock. But they could be a pretty big processing hit as well… it would be interesting to see though.

Thanks for the hard work guys… I got a chance to promote sIFR a bit in my Advanced CSS Session at Macromedia’s MAX conference last week. It was surprising how few were aware of it’s powers (and existence)… looks like we have more work to do. ;)

I was going to read and see if my requests were already here, but I figured it would be better for ya’ll to see the quantity of requests for a certain feature. Mind you, I’m totally flash ignorant, so bear with me if these are flash limitations.

1. Better Typographic Control. I’d love to be able to tighten up the kerning.

2. I wish the flash wouldn’t render in CSS-off situations. This one is pretty trivial really, but it would be nice to have.

I have to agree with a few of the other comments. sIFR is good enough as it is, but hwat’s wrong with improvement. Anyway, I’d like to see Alpha transparency support, tiling images as backgrounds, and possibly vertical distribution of headlines along with horizontal distribution.

Jim (#31): Web developers are not the only people resizing text after a page has loaded. I do it when I’m browsing the web and enter sites with text that is too small to read. Ok, so I’m a web developer, but what I mean is that text size may need to be adjusted on a site-by-site basis.

At first glance, the University of Washington’s admission web site looks stunning. However! It’s an admission web site and CAN NOT find where to “apply” to the university. That’s a major issue for an admission web site if users are unable to find the application to the university.

Second, the text “Experience the University of Washington in all its energy and diversity. Everything you need is right here: the latest headlines, the best tips for visitors to Seattle, and up-to-the-minute advice on how to apply.” located in the middle of the page looks really out of place on the web site.

Just my 2 cents.

(Editor’s Note: “Apply” is right there in the main navigation at the top of the screen.)

Not sure if this is fixed in Flash, or something you can alter, but when you highlight text, it always uses a black background. On the University of Washington site, on the first page, this makes the highlight hard to see, as the backgrounds are dark shades. However, try the Academics page. The background is black, hence I cannot see the highlight at all! I had to copy the text and paste it into Notepad2 just to prove it was actually copyable. A bit of a problem here methinks. Over to you guys…

For creating SIFR without flash, you should check SWFMILL & MTASC.
It is really easy to embed a font and then compile the code (that must be in AS2).
You should change some things (like creating the text field via AS), but after that, all works perfectly.

The problem with flash over menus is not solvable by the nice people here. ItÂ´s a problem with plugins and should be solved by browser vendors (iÂ´ve solved it on some sites by hidding the sifr text while the menu is open, but is not nice).

Kerning: Currently not possible. Only letter spacing is supported in flash (and in version 8 and above).

Background images: in flash 8, itÂ´s possible.

Text selection: Using a hack it could be done (flash doesnÂ´t let you change that).

I put an overlay gradient layer on my sIFR headings http://www.irishstu.com couldn’t find a way to make it scale – probably cos I suck at actionscript! So, how about an optional layer with a scaling object that can have effects on it? oh, and how about being able to make a flipped “reflection” effect?

I’d love to see a sIFR solution to replacing the initial caps for the titles of my blog posts, without having to use imagery and without have to resort to custom code for each title. The center alignment of a title might be an issue, but I’m sure I’d be willing to switch to left alignment if it meant using something like sIFR instead.

I asked about this one in the form, but just curious to know if it’s possible. I’d like to be able to have sIFR replace a pseudo-element, i.e., p:first-letter. I’ve got sIFR dropcaps working cross-browser, but being able to use a pseudo-element rather than having to wrap them manually in spans would be pretty cool.

Did you direct the AT&T link in your “I almost forgot…” comment to your own website on purpose ? Haha. Yeah, you might want to change that. I know that this is an old post, but some, like me, end up reading this stuff a wee bit later than others.

I second Cameron Moll’s request, if only to tidy up his RSS feeds. A list of actual headlines in my Firefox RSS bookmarks would be better than a list of entries like <img class=”capO” src=”/img/letters/o.gif”… :)

While I appreciate what is trying to be accompished with sIFR – there isn’t a better “font embedding” solution out there – I really think that reliability and some of the more basic functionality/documentation needs to be tackled first before getting excited about new whiz-bang features. There’s a reason sIFR is limited to fixed width headings and you don’t see people making cool tabbed menus or more clever implimentations

Let’s start by simply improving the documentation. I for one would like to see an explanation of what are the decoy styles are really all about. Are there well documented examples of how to “tweak” sIFR fonts – particularly in complex situations. Why are the results so unpredicatable?

While sIFR works fine for simple headings (h1, h2, and that’s great!) it seems to completely fall apart when the elements it is assigned to has more “complex” css proporties. sIFR seems to attach special importance to certain properties in a bit of a confusing way. In my tests sIFR seems to ignore font-size all together and use line-height instead. If you’re element has a height on it then it will ignore the line-height as use the element height. A bit confusing since it quitw common to come across situations where you font is smaller than your line height.

So for those of us who are tired of tweaking in order to “discover” sIFR’s behaviour please improve the documentation and provide more complex real world examples. You’ve got the designers and PHBs excited about using real typefaces again. Please help us developers deliver on this promise.’

Not true actually. sIFR is not limited to fixed-width headlines and it also works just fine with tabs menus and other clever implementations. It’s usually at it’s simple when put to work on simple tasks though.

I do, however, very much agree with you that sIFR is, unfortunately much easier for javascript/coding types to use than designers… which is a paradox that is probably not solvable at this point in time. Clearly it would be much better for things to be the other way around.

As for the way sIFR sizes things, yes, it’s *totally* counter to how you’re used to sizing type on the web, but it’s really not that hard to understand. The original article on sIFR is available here and explains the sizing pretty comprehensively. What happens is that your normal browser text renders first as a block level element. sIFR measures the height and width of this block and then replaces the block with a Flash movie. Then, the text is injected into the Flash movie and scaled up until it’s snug against the edges of the box.

Following up on Mark Priestap’s comments, an all-in-one tool to SWFerize fonts would be hugely appreciated.

The website tool suggestion is a great one: Fill in a form, select the permissions & domain(s), specify if all the glyphs are to be included or only a subset, upload the font to be used and get back the generated file.

Free, advertising supported, a few bucks a transform, however paid for, this would really improve things for the less technically inclined folks.

sIFR has been pretty good for me and I only have one significant complaint

Text Size should be set with a number.

As you said Mike, it is totally counter intuitive to have to set the size of the block element to achieve the proper text size. Yes, studying/improving the documentation would help but at its root the problem (imho) is really the concept.

Also, the more attributes that can be handled from CSS the better.

I’d be pretty excited to see the handling of widows, orphans, and hanging punctuation as well.

Sifr’s great! One thing I’d like to see in the next version (or as a fix to the current one) is something that addresses a problem I came across recently while using the PC’s at my school’s library (both WinIE6 and Netscape 7.2). It seems that when Quicktime is set to handle Flash movies, sifr fails to show either the replacement text or the fallback text, and instead the user gets a Quicktime plugin icon. My apologies if there’s a way around this (other than telling someone to switch applications that handle Flash) that I missed. Thanks!

Graham – If you don’t have Flash and you would like to use sIFR, I would be glad to create the files for you. I don’t have any commercial fonts, but if it is a font from dafont.com, or any other free font site you can email me at alec (at) alecloudenback.com and I will e-mail you the files.

I think if you asked a lot of people they would do the same also – it’s not a long or difficult process at all.

It’s already been discussed, but a way to create sIFR without the flash IDE would be the best thing for me. I’m currently looking into that, but not being an actionscript expert, it is not really effective.

I don’t really want to cash out only for that (even if I think it might be worth it) since I’m not so much of a Flash person, but in this case I agree it rocks.

I’d like to reiterate the request for the “Ability to use (and abuse) Flash 8’s live effects like soft drop shadows behind text”. I have created a template for intranet sites at the company I work for and use sIFR for headings. Though better than plain text it would be nice to have a drop shadow behind the text, especially when the text is over a graphic.

Better anti-aliasing is always a plus.

At work, computers that don’t have the Flash player installed display an icon instead of text.

The block element should be able to size to the page when using a liquid layout. The width of the Flash movie should be no wider than the text.

Tanny- are the icons that display the little Q quicktime icons? If so, that’s the same problem I had described- Quicktime can hijack Flash. This would actually seem to be quite a big deal because it makes accessibility worse, so I’m hoping there’s a way to fix it. I would guess that you can circumvent the problem on your work computers by disassociating .swf files with Quicktime. However, that’s not really a solution to the fundamental problem… Has anyone else come across this? Any word on whether there might be a solution?

Regarding the accessibility of sIFR – it would be great to clarify in the documentation the impact of choosing to use the sWmode argument (that is, if you use “window” for the value there is the possibility that the Flash content will be read in addition to the replaced content.). Also, there is a problem for keyboard users when the Flash content has linked buttons — keyboard users will tab through links in the replaced content as well as the buttons in the Flash content. This is not a big problem when there is a single link, but if this is used to replace a chunk of content with several links the burden on the user increases quickly. Not only does the user need to tab through the links, but the default wmode setting makes the default focus rectangle invisible, which adds to the potential confusion.

Seconded (thirded, fourthded?) the request to remove the need for Flash to create the .swf file (if it’s possible?). I’d have to invest $$$ in Flash for the newer version sIFR, which is unfortunately hard to justify just for (admittedly gorgeous) titles. A web-based tool for that purpose would be great – even if I had to install it on my own site first.

As for the “not having Flash” thing, Macromedia has a 30 day trial available. Probably not the best solution in the world, but if you’re looking to convert a batch of fonts, which is what I did, you have 30 days to do it in. The demo I downloaded is on the Macromedia site at http://www.macromedia.com/downloads/.

And another thing… there’s a cool sIFR plugin available for WordPress. Its still a work in progress, but it works out of the box for the features it has. I’m using it on my site at http://www.blahgkarma.com/wp, and it rocks. Now if I only knew something about web design, I’d really be cooking with gas – but wait, I don’t have to know that stuff to use sIFR, now do I!

A nice feature to have would be the possibility of hiding sIFR flash when hiding the container object. If you put a sIFRed tag in a div, then try to hide the DIV at runtime, sIFR-flash stays in place … and it is not a good thing.

I love everything about Sifr so far except for the ability to somehow detect if flashblock is installed and to disable the sifr.js altogether when flashblock is encountered. Not entirely sure how to do that but it would be a major boon since some of the sifr deployments I’ve done require that text be much larger in the script than it normally would be.
Possibly another suggestion would perhaps be a php based configuration tool ala flashy-titles for wordpress. Granted it would still take a large amount of configuration manually but the ability for quickly changing the options or even choosing the particular font would be quite handy.

Dan – You’re right, the icons where Quicktime icons. I got the SA group at work to put the Flash 8 player on every PC (50,000+), which gets rid of the problem at work. Unfortunately it is still a problem for those that have allowed Quicktime to hijack flash content.

It would be nice if sIFR would only work if Flash was the default program for .swf files.

It would be nice if sIFR used the text that is created by CSS rules. For instance I may have a rule that transforms text to lowercase but another rule for a nested element that does not transform case. Here’s an example.

The reason I would even want to do this, is that where I work, the intranet standard for H2 headings is that text is lowercase and acronyms are uppercase. In the future they might want to use propercase and since it is a heading the markup should be in propercase. Changing this works with standard CSS. How do I do this with sIFR?

Im having troubles getting sifr to work with the pngfix.js that was released so that IE can view transparent png’s. When I disable the pngfix sifr shows up just great on IE, while when it’s disabled.. it doesn’t.. They work fine together on Firefox. So if 3 could work with pngfix.js then that would be excellent.. and if someone knows a fix to sifr2 or to pngfix, please let me know! :)

would be good to be able to not need to supply pixel based font sizes and for the sifr technique to not screw with all headlines e.g. any replacement techniques used for h1 and top header graphics dont come out

also noticed that any element set to relative positioning doesnt come out in SIFR, you need a div wrapping round it to get it to work.

sIFR should not in any way hide textual content from search engines or users. I find that text rendered by sIFR cannot be found when you use the “Find (on this page)” command in the browser. Hope you can fix it.

I want to echo Ben Scott’s comment that font sizes shouldn’t have to be specified in pixels. I always (and this is generally regarded as best practice in CSS) set my headings as a percentage of the base font size to ensure they are always some degree bigger than the regular paragraph text. If I have to set font sizes for SIFR in pixels, and a user has a larger than default font size set on his browser, he will get heading text that is smaller than the regular paragraph text.

In the SIFR 3 alpha, I can set font sizes in percentages and have the size of the Flash text come out roughly correct (which is all I desire), but it does screwy things to the margins of the headings.

The ability to replace multiple selectors with one sIFR.replace() call.

I’m finding myself frequently duplicating calls to sIFR.replace() with the same parameters because the same style needs to be applied to multiple selectors. If I could pass an array of selectors instead of just one at a time, it would cleanup the code a bit.

The current version of sIFR 3 has support for this, in the form of a sIFR-ignore class. It might also be possible do support a not() selector. I’m not sure of the syntax but something like “#topnav h2::not(#topnav h2.special)”.

I use swfdec (aka “the free flash implementation that works with youtube”) but sIFR doesn’t work. And it doesn’t degrade either. I don’t know if sIFR can be fixed to work with swfdec (probably it should be the other way ’round) but it would be nice to at least be able to see the browser text.

Just wondering what the status is of sIFR 3. The request for requests was made back in Oct. of 2005 and there have been no recent posts or updates. I realize that 128 requests is a tall order, but is it still being developed or has something else come along that makes sIFR obsolete?

micthemouse: Good question. In my mind, it’s ready to be released, and has been for about a year. I’ve been using it on Mike Industries for probably a year now and it’s been great. Mark, the lead developer on the project, still has a few things he wants to work out before officially releasing it. I encourage you to bug him. :)

31 years later, it’s safe to say this is one of the most prescient speeches about technology ever delivered. Jobs covers wireless networking, tablets, Google StreetView, Siri, and the App Store (among other things) many years before their proliferation. A fantastic listen.

A fantastic app for prototyping your design work onto real world objects like billboards, book covers, and coffee cups. This seems like just as great of a tool for people learning design as it does for experts.

If you’re wondering what a excellent blueprint for a modern media company looks like, look no further than Buzzfeed CEO Jonah Peretti’s latest email to his employees. In it, Peretti explains a lot of his company’s virtues, the most important being a relentless focus on always providing what’s best for the user. Vox Media (operators of The Verge) is the only other company I can think of which approaches this level of reform and execution.